What how these Sudanese religiots laugh as this poor woman is beaten in public.

Her crime? Indecent dressing. Bikini? Crotchless panties in public? No… trousers.

On November 17, 2010, an Executive Order was issued that affects faith-based organizations that receive federal funds. Significant in the fundamental principles outlined in section 2 of the order are several changes. Mentioned early on is the intent to keep organizations that compete for federal funds on an even footing, whether they are faith-based or not. Very clearly stipulated is this, “[n]o organization should be discriminated against on the basis of religion or religious belief,” and:

All organizations that receive Federal financial assistance under social service programs should be prohibited from discriminating against beneficiaries or prospective beneficiaries of the social service programs on the basis of religion or religious belief. Accordingly, organizations, in providing services supported in whole or in part with Federal financial assistance, and in their outreach activities related to such services, should not be allowed to discriminate against current or prospective program beneficiaries on the basis of religion, a religious belief, a refusal to hold a religious belief, or a refusal to attend or participate in a religious practice.

Faith-based organizations will, however, still be allowed to perform “explicitly religious activities,” they just won’t be permitted to perform these activities in the course of providing the services they get funds for.

So what does this mean?

It looks like it means AA can’t receive federal funding for its very questionable services unless about 7 of the 12 steps are left out. Those 7 steps call upon a supernatural creator, -a Christian god.

It means the Boy Scouts shouldn’t be receiving any federal funds (either in cash or trade as with space for jamborees on federal land). As an organization of bigots, the Scouts discriminate based on religious belief (and “a refusal to hold a religious belief”) as well as sexual preference.

It means missions and soup kitchens that reach out to the homeless with blankets and warm food won’t get to proselytize to them

Related articles

• SCA: Faith-Based Initiatives Hearing Written Testimony (secularnewsdaily.com)
• Obama Alters Faith-Based Funding (abcnews.go.com)
• President Obama issues executive order implementing long-awaited reforms of the faith-based office (secularnewsdaily.com)
• Obama makes changes to faith-based partnerships (sfgate.com)
• Obama Executive Order On ‘Faith-Based’ Initiative Is Disappointing, Says Americans United (secularnewsdaily.com)

I was apparently invited to call in based on my modest comments in my previous post which were, admittedly, not as well thought out as I probably could have. Still, its the second time I’ve been invited to speak my views on a radio call show. It’s also twice now that I haven’t been able to do it. I found out too late this time. For the previous invitation, the show was cancelled before I was scheduled!

Still, if you’re interested in a very brief debate on the BBC’s World Have Your Say, click on this podcast link (it links to the MP3 file). Here’s the show-notes page on their blog, which also has the podcast link. Skip to about 40 min into the podcast unless you want to listen to the first debate about the Amazon Pedophile book.

Related articles

• Pakistani death sentence appeal (bbc.co.uk)
• Blasphemy Charges in Egypt & Palestine: This Week in Online Tyranny (readwriteweb.com)
• Pakistani Christian Sentenced to Death for Blasphemy (waronterrornews.typepad.com)
• “Riots follow the shooting of Pakistani Christians accused of blasphemy” and related posts (freethinker.co.uk)

“The Quran is fake and your prophet remained in bed for one month before his death because he had worms in his ears and mouth. He married Khadija just for money and after looting her kicked her out of the house.”

At least this is what a Pakistan policeman alleges that Asia Bibi said to Muslims in Pakistan. Bibi was arrested and tried for blasphemy (you know, that victim-less crime?) then sentenced to die for her words. Bibi is a Christian mother of five and claims the charges against her are false, and that she is being persecuted for her own superstition in a nation with a majority that follow cults of Islam.

Regardless, only the most backward of societies -the most primitive of this world- would still have the barbaric and mindless law which allows a death sentence for blasphemy. As a government, Pakistan’s is the laughing stock of the world. It’s people are pitiful and backward not stand up for common sense and human rights above any superstition.

And they’re not alone. In Palestine, a once anonymous blogger was arrested in a sting operation for blaspheming Allah and his silly “prophet” Muhammad. He faces life in prison for his “crime” and one superstitious resident of his town (Qalqiliya, Palestine) said he “should be burned to death.”

Jesus fucking christ on a stick. Burned to death! For talking shit about a supernatural being that clearly either doesn’t exist or doesn’t care since he let the man speak his mind.

Blasphemy laws and the sentences carried out under them are evidence that man’s gods are invented. If a god truly is all-powerful, then why would someone criticizing it in public be any sort of threat?  If the god is real, let the god strike the “blasphemer” down. This is a way for religious hierarchy to police it’s followers. “At its peak, Husayin’s Arabic-language blog had more than 70,000 visitors, overwhelmingly from Arab countries.” That’s a lot of potential apostates. For those in power in Islam to remain in power, they have to keep the ignorant in line.

It just doesn’t do for people to start to question or think.

H/T: Pharyngula

Related articles

• Freedom of Speech in The West Bank (ephraiyim.wordpress.com)
• Palestinian held for Facebook criticism of Islam (sfgate.com)
• Allah does not exist, and Mohammed was a fraud (scienceblogs.com)
• Palestinian held for Facebook criticism of Islam (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Pakistani Christian Sentenced to Death for Blasphemy (waronterrornews.typepad.com)
• Christian Woman Sentenced To Death In Pakistan For Rejecting Islam (rhymeswithright.mu.nu)

In a recent article I discovered online with Dalje.com, a Croatian site, I came across the following quote^[1].

But is the Catholic church being unfairly targeted, and, if so, why? Are atheists innocent of child abuse, or Protestants, or Jews? While it is true that the Catholic church represents the largest single religious entity in the world, and wields great influence, should it therefore be held to a higher standard by the media? It doesn’t seem quite fair. After all, does a child suffer less agony, physical and emotional, from the illicit touch of an atheist, a rabbi, or a Protestant minister than that of a Catholic? Of course not. And should a pastor or a rabbi or an atheist be spared humiliation, disgrace, and public reprobation in the media and his community because he belongs to a smaller, non-Catholic religious denomination?

The author, Julienne Eden BuÅ¡ić, is clearly missing the points of the criticisms against the Catholic church. The point isn’t that critics perceive Catholicism as a cult of pedophilia, rather it’s perceived as a cult of cover-up.

The one thing that the other groups the author mentioned (atheists, Protestants, Jews) as well as those not mentioned have in common is that they shun pedophiles and rapists within their groups. It is rare that these groups seek to pay off officials, intimidate victims, witnesses, and complainants, or relocate these dangerous criminals to new, fresh sources of pleasure.

We’re not talking about pastors who are drunks or guilty of skimming the collection plates. We’re not even talking about clergy who make unwanted advances on adults. We’re talking about predators who put their genitalia in the mouths of children for their own pleasure and then shame the children into silence. The predators are then protected, not by their immediate friends, but the entire Catholic church, starting with the pope himself.

This is a crime against humanity and one that should not go unpunished. The pope himself should be held accountable and, with any luck, will be arrested once he arrives in Britain.

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• Idiots of the Week: Those Defending Pedophile Priests (atheistrev.com)
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• Police question Belgian cardinal over child abuse (newsinfo.inquirer.net)

1. Frogs in Water, found online at: http://dalje.com/en-bestseller/frogs-in-water/314382#bottom, last accessed 7/15/10

Throughout history (and probably prehistory) there has been a separation between the sacred and the “profane.” The religious and the secular. The Greeks used what they called a tenemos, which was a physical barrier that surrounded the temple and delineated religious ground and property from the non-religious. Anthropologists frequently term this the sacred vs. the profane.

Modern religious adherents also refer to the secular as the profane, but they mean it in a different way than anthropologists. They seek to demean, denegrate, and marginalize secular beliefs, ideals, and positions. Religious nuts like “Dr.” Kelly Hollowell act as pundits for their supersitions, blaming “secular values” for all manner of social ills, real or imagined. They typically create strawman arguments associating “secularism” with violent crime, abortion, teen pregnancy, forced sex, and terrorism. The idea being that equating the word secular with the real or perceived evils of society creates the impression that “Secular”=bad; “Religion”=good.

This couldn’t be further from the truth when a rational examination of the facts is done. Time after time the undeniable correlation is shown to exist between these “evils” and religious superstition. In a nation that claims 75% of the population is “Christian,” what could possibly be concluded from a rate of cheating in high school that is of a similar rate except that religion doesn’t work.

Secular simply means separate from religion. One can be both secular and religious, for instance, if one chooses to keep religious doctrine out of government. The fallacy of equivocating “secular” with “atheist” and “evil” isn’t unintentional. The religious adherents that do this have a very dishonest intent: to unfairly malign that which questions their superstitions with that which is hated; to perpetuate the taboo of questioning and criticizing religion and religious superstition.

Image via Wikipedia

And probably a bigot. And he’s pissed at PZ Myers for pointing it out.

As many know, PZ Myers of the Pharyngula blog, has visited the Creation Museum created by creationist nutter Ken Ham. And he took pictures so the rest of us could visit without actually having to pay the entrance fee. Some have been critical of visits by rationalists to the irrational museum since their entrance fees help fund ignorance, but I think the net outcome of PZ’s visit might prove costly to the “museum.” In the words of Ken Ham, “[i]t was obvious from all the previous things he’d written that he was coming to scoff and call what we do an “abomination.””

An abomination: That which is abominable; anything hateful, wicked, or shamefully vile; an object or state that excites disgust and hatred; a hateful or shameful vice; pollution [Webster].

Yes, I’d say that’s what Ham’s “museum” is. An abomination.

Particularly if you consider the racist montage that Ham’s museum has to explain human origins, which shows all “races” originated from the children of Noah, with the “cursed off-spring of Ham” giving rise to the black people of Africa. The same excuse used by antebellum racial conservatives to enslave African blacks and by postbellum racial conservatives to oppress freed blacks well into the 20th century.^[1] And boy is Ken Ham pissed. Perhaps he thinks he’s a descendant of the Noachian, thus mythical, Ham and personally maligned. He has this to say:

I publicly challenge this professor to document with photographs and actual scripts that the Creation Museum teaches “that black people in particular were the cursed offspring of Ham”!! Not only do we not teach such an absurd idea (that sadly has been used by some to promote racism and prejudice against dark skinned people), we teach against it.

But the challenge has already been met. The photograph of the museum display, showing the completely baseless, ignorant, and racial assertion was posted by PZ:

Photo by PZ Myers at Pharyngula

Add to this the biblical mythology of Genesis, which provide the verses used by racists for over 200 years to enslave and oppress blacks. Ham maintains that he’s not a racist, pointing out how the position of his cult is one that considers there to be only one “race” of humanity, but at some point he has to reconcile his adherence to biblical mythology with reality. Reality shows us that the planet is far older than is claimed by Ham’s cult on the basis of mythology. Reality shows us that genetic dispersal of the human genome occurred of hundreds of thousands of years ago (or millions, depending on if you consider early hominids).

Without a shred of evidence, Ken Ham and his cult have erected a museum to a mythical and, in light of scientific advances in genetics, astronomy, chemistry, geology, paleontology, biology, anthropology, and physics, ignorant set of beliefs suitable only for Bronze Age goat-herders.

Ken Ham would have the world believe that racism is a product of evolution. But if he were truly opposed to racism and bigotry, he would acknowledge the fact of evolution and the human diaspora from Africa beginning as early as 1.7 million years ago. And he would abandon his ignorant and bigoted stance against same-sex marriage and homosexuality.

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1. Haynes, Stephen R. (2002). Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Just a few days ago, the “American Family Association,” an organization of religious fundamentalists bent on imposing their particular superstitions on the rest of the country (U.S.), sent an email “alert” that called for their members to “take action” against the “Darwinists” who are attacking the Texas public school system.

Make no doubt about it, the Texas public school system is under attack, but its under attack by the ignorant and superstitious who want to devalue science and eliminate threats to their superstitions.

And that is key to getting at the core issue in trying to discover what motivates the fear these people have about science, particularly evolutionary sciences.

The AFA begins their email with, “Texas public schools science standards are under attack from those who deny there are any weaknesses in Darwin’s theory of evolution.” This statement is fallacious and wrong in so many ways, most notably that most biologists, scientists and those who have had a few years of college are not covered by their accusation. Nor is there any evidence that any other group is “attacking” science standards in Texas.

Darwin’s theory of evolution had many weaknesses. Darwin even discussed them. However, over the course of the last few decades, science has been able to improve on Darwin’s theory to the point at which it really isn’t “Darwin’s” but, rather, the theory of modern science. And, as theories go, it ranks up there with gravity, atomic, and relativity in the body of work that supports it.

What these religious nuts fail to say is that, while there are still some weaknesses (i.e. questions about the hows and whys), there are absolutely no competing theories which provide any rational explanation for how life on this planet came to be. Their alternative is that a god did it -but there is absolutely no demonstration or support for that claim.

The “weaknesses” of evolutionary science are, in fact, its strengths. Science admits to having questions. It admits to the possibility of being wrong. It admits to the willingness to revise in light of new data. None of this can be said about the alternative explanations of religious dogma -explanations which are so absurd as to be easily considered mental delusion and downright wacky.

The motivation, then, that religious nuts have in fearing evolution is that of education. The more educated their followers become -the less likely they are to accept hokey and wacky ideas. It follows then that they will be less likely to attend meetings where these wacky ideas are espoused. It also follows that the are more likely to question the dogma of any organization that is willing to admit some of its ideas are too wacky to be taken literally.

Less following, less membership, and decreased superstition = less money, less power, and decreased influence.

Leaders of religious nuts must, by definition, fight rational thought and science lest it cure the delusions they’ve built around their followers and break the spell they hold over them.

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This is an interesting topic and one that I’ve been putting together a blog post about but haven’t gotten around to it yet.

Of course, it’s important to note that not all religionists kill. In fact, very few, by comparison kill in the name of their religion and/or god(s). But the fact that even a small minority do (and sometimes on a grand scale as we’ve seen with the World Trade Center attacks, the Holocaust, the Inquisition, the Crusades, and the various conflicts that are going on around the world today) is reason enough to inquire into the reason behind such heinous and horrible behavior.

There are, of course, those that would try to make the claim that atheists kill far more (the tired and worn Pol Pot/Stalin claim), but never -never- has an atheist ever said I’m killing because I’m an atheist. Not Stalin. Not Pol Pot. Not any atheist that I’ve ever seen. There, no doubt, exist such people -even they’ve never been publicized, but their incidence is so small that it pales in comparisson to religionists who are open about the supposed “rationale” behind their own horrible actions.

Here are but a few headlines and snippets from google:

Indian village proud after double “honor killing”

Teen girl in critical condition after alleged dispute over hijab

God told me to kill my baby

Washington: murder suspect: “I kill for god.”

Man says he killed in the name of god

Killed in the name of god, youth killed for refusing ‘donation.’

She killed in the name of god

Angel killed in the name of god; Shaunnah, Mum, Gran wiped out by Moslem (sic) gunmen.

Jehovah’s Witnesses caught by police after killing spree in Russia

Church official calls killing spree a ‘satanic’ act

A lot of the links above are Muslim and Indian religionists, killing in the name of their imagined gods. But, make no mistake: given half the chance, Christian religionists would do the same. Take the case of Paul Hill, who is lauded as a “hero” but Christian nuts who operate the Army of God website, dedicated to anti-abortion fanaticism.

Its one thing to be opposed to abortion. Quite another to murder and commit terrorism in the name of your “cause.” Paul Hill was a terrorist and a murderer. But these nuts call him a hero.

This gives some taste of the why some religious people become killers. They think their god(s) give(s) them authority to do so. They believe that the murders they commit are just and the will of their god(s).

Case in point is Christian, Terry Mark Mangum, a Texas man who believed that god “instructed” him to hunt down and kill a gay man. So he did. I linked to his story above, but Google “Terry Mark Mangum” and see for yourself.

The BTK serial killer, David Rader was a Lutheran and a devout member of the church. His pastor believed (but only after Rader’s extra-curricular activities became known to him) that Rader was “demon-possessed.”

What about the 1-year old murdered by her mother for not saying, “amen?” Surely that isn’t a command by god? Ironically (in the most tragic of ironies), the family’s pastor pleaded guilty to molesting young boys, so the mother left the church and ended up with an even more sinister cult called 1 Mind Ministries led by “Queen Antoinette” (I only wish I were making this up!) who keeps the small group in a tight-knit clutch “and operates under the extremely god-driven Queen’s direction.” True, they’re crazy, but the trigger to murder here is religion and religious dogma.

Andrea Yates thought god was telling her to sacrifice her children (in the tradition of the Abrahamic myth?), so she did.

Dena Schlosser wanted to give her child to god. So she did. By cutting off the arms fo her youngest daughter.

But, in an culture that makes it okay to kill in the name of god, why should it be expected that some of the strictest adherents who already happened to have some screws loose might not be willing to start “pleasing their god?” One of the central doctrines of Christian superstition is the “End Times”, which entails the second coming of Jesus (the alleged Christ who is a couple thousand years late) and the “rapture” of all “god’s children” to heaven, leaving behind all the heathens, unbelievers, atheists, Satan’s minions, lawyers, republicans, etc. There’s even a special video game you can play in which you convert or kill atheists and non-believers for god until you earn your way into heaven.

The Left Behind game is an abomination to humanity and, if there was ever a video game that inspired someone to kill, it was this one. What better reason to kill than if you know you have a ‘get out of jail free card’ signed by the highest authority?

So much for going to church for fellowship and to rejoice with your neighbors and have some fun and be happy.

Atheist Revolution has a quick look at a brochure he received in the mail advertising his local church’s programming in “Kingdom Come: Understanding the End of the World.”

I’d probably sign up for the “2 BILLION TO DIE” seminar since its on Wednesday evenings. My Sundays are already full and I’m not clearing my schedule for “ARMADGEDDON: THE EARTH’S LAST BATTLE.”

You’ve got to figure there are probably four types of Christian. Those that: 1) think the end times will come in their lifetime, 2) think end times will come after their life time, 3) don’t give it much thought, 4) don’t believe in end times at all.

So what do you think goes through the minds of those that truly believe the end is nigh and their god is coming for them any day now? They probably abuse credit, don’t worry about getting an education for themselves or their kids, bother with long-term health plans, and couldn’t give a care about the environment. I sure hope there aren’t many in categories 1 and 2.

Edit: fixed an error. Thanks Digital Dame!